This is a list of every book I recommend and why. This page is constantly being updated.

This is based off of some of the lists other people have shared, like Mark's.

I also have the opposite page, Books I Hate.

Literature

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Great book about a man looking for treasure and all the learnings he has as he looks for it. It is one of my most treasured books.

Ham on Rye by Bukowski

It's hard to find an author who has let their inner thoughts spill over the page more than Bukowski, you will not be spared thoughts that other authors would have considered "too harsh" or "too raw". That is what Bukowski is about, and if you read this book, you might find out why he is this way.

A Study in Red by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is the first book that got me into reading books. It's the first Sherlock Holmes novel. It's an amazing thing to see how a master in deduction operates, and since Arthur worked with Joseph Bel,l a genius in drawing astute findings from tiny details, he had a lot to draw from.

It's my favorite novel by far and shows how training your mind to notice, you can the world opens up to you.

Dune by Frank Herbert

Read this book. You might not like the story, you might hate how its being told, it's still a great book nonetheless and you will find something profound by reading it, you might agree with the cynicism towards religion that the author repeats throughout the book, you might disagree with it, you might see the protagonist as a villain, or a misunderstood hero. You could be amazed by the worldbuilding, the lore, the dialogue, or the psychedelic flow of the story, or you might not, but you will not be apathetic towards this book.

This is a book about humanity, it could be described as Shakespeare in space on drugs. You will find how humans adapt to a reality that demands technology but that forces it to occur via human augmentation, not robots, not AI. By far one of the most surprising science fiction books I have ever read.

Children of Dune

It's the closing chapter of the story started with Paul Muadib Atreides, and follows his two children. The best way I can describe this is: It's the most ambitious sci-fi story I've read so far. I would have been surprised to see it being written today, never mind decades ago.

Frank Herbert's understanding of psychology and seeing things through to their realistic end in a fantasy world is amazing. Without spoiling for people who haven't read the other books or haven't watched the movies, this reads as a Greek Tragedy in space. It's chilling, and you feel every sacrifice made.

King of Elfland's Daughter

By far the best fiction I've read this year(2025), after being very depressed at the end of Children of Dune, I decided to read fiction that wouldn't make me depressed anymore, haha(which eventually led me to Tolkien).

This book was a rare find. I looked at "fantasy books that weren't turned into movies yet," and this came out.

Dunsany is a poet, and this book transforms the way you view fantasy by the way it is written. It reads like a long poem, with repeating mantras that get you to the other side of things you know. Beyond the fields we know. Every paragraph rhymes with the next, entire chapters rhyme with others and you just feel yourself entering this trance and deeper and deeper into the story. I haven't felt this with any other book before. If you want to read a beautiful story that engages your imagination, I can't recommend this enough.

Dunsany has also been the inspiration of great novelists like Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Lovecraft, and even Tolkien himself.

The Hobbit

After years of hating Lord of the Rings movies, I caught myself watching it again during the pandemic and couldn't stop crying watching it. Something in me changed that stopped seeing the movies as "boring" and started recognizing how real they were, behind all the high fantasy.

If there ever comes a point in your life when you think you have lost your strength, when the world is a huge ball of fear you must face every single day, and you become a coward. And then something reminds you of the strength you have, and that it hasn't left you. Then you will understand King Theoden.

If you ever feel small in the face of grave danger and choose to fight it anyway because there are more important things than the things you fear, you will understand Frodo and Sam.

It's a beautiful story, but I haven't read any of the books until this year. After Dunsany, though, I decided it was time.

I finished reading The Hobbit the night before Christmas. I loved reading it, although I must confess Tolkien's prose wasn't as fantastical as Dunsany's was to me. But I enjoyed the book thoroughly. The good professor managed to create a whole world that makes you wanna live in it.

Histórias Escritas na Água by Sonia Zaghetto (Stories Written in Water)

This book, called "Histórias Escritas na Água"(Stories Written in Water), was written by a good friend of mine who has led a brilliant career in journalism that is now venturing into literature.

It's a book that mixes multiple mythologies from all over the world, with stories that deal with guilt, regret, and painful memories. Each chapter has a different story that then gets joined at the end.

I love it when authors don't try to control the narrative or pass a specific message. She wrote the book according to what the characters' own motivations were. She often said it was as if the characters were sitting next to her, whispering what happened into her ear.

I highly recommend her book if you speak Portuguese; if not, I'll let you know when a translation comes out.

I, Robot by Azimov

One of the best books I read growing up. Really makes your imagination fly with all the possibilities of life alongside robots, and how the relationship amongst humans would change with them in the picture. Somehow a complete 180 from Dune.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

This is a great book period, it reads well, it has texture, multiple stories coming together alongside the main one in a beautiful way.

Artsy

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

One of those books that you can reread endlessly and still find new things in it. I love reading this book whenever I'm feeling creatively drained and need a pick me up.

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

This changed my mind completely on how to do great design, how to have an eye for bullshit and how to do great presentations.

Inspired these blog posts:

• Next Level Presentations [1/3]: 🙉 Preparation!
• Next Level Presentations [2/3]: 🙈Design!
• Next Level Presentations [3/3]: 🙊Delivery!!!

Update: Garr has since followed me on X, I'm very honored by it.

Steal Like an Artist

Brilliant book to get out of your head and into whatever you call your art in life. Really quick one, you can read in an afternoon, but the insights will seep into all parts of your life where you block your own progress.

Philosophy

Anti-Fragile (and the rest of the Incerto) by Nassim Taleb

AntiFragile, Black Swan, Skin in the Game, ... by Nassim Taleb -> completely changed my mind on business, personal philosophy, travel, and economy.

Inspired these blog posts:

• 🧠 Intelligent Investments with Nassim Taleb
• 🏅Extremistan - The Place Where Winners Take it All

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Helped me get better in a bad period of my life, made me start structuring more since I'm a creative mess of a person. Chaos was my ally, but I never understood why structure could add to my creative process.

Funny that both of these authors hate each other's guts. Anyways, fun times. And what's even more interesting, I love old Jordan Peterson's lectures, but I hate his writing style, meanwhile I hate Nassim's lectures but I love how he writes.

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Joseph Piper

This was a rare find. The shortest book in the year and possibly the one that made the biggest impact on me. Piper tells the story of how philosophy was created as a field, and how it was transformed into something it wasn't meant to be.

At first, he reintroduces the term Liberal Arts. If you are college-educated, you probably know what it is. Well, do you?

Nowadays, liberal arts are at the study sitting on the opposite end of STEM( engineering, maths, etc). But it's hard to define what it is, as we are constantly redefining terms, and "arts" and "liberal" being one of them.

He reintroduces the terms from their original meaning. Liberal arts as "artes liberales", on the opposite end of "artes serviles". Artes Serviles were things that had a purpose. You study woodworking to make chairs, you become a stonemason to make tools, and an engineer to engineer things.

Artes Liberales, by comparison, are things that are the end in themselves, and the purest of them is Philosophy. The moment you start to philosophize "in order to" you have lost the spirit of philosophy.

And so he goes on to describe how philosophers from ancient Greece and later on from Christian monasteries have developed the field, and how the field changed drastically during the Enlightenment. I'm not gonna give more of it away, if you come out of this post and only read one book, I highly recommend this one(it's also the shortest).

I'm looking to enhance this section of my books to recommend. If you have any philosophical books you recommend, feel free to message me on X.

Historical

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari

Such a great book to understand how many factors changed human trajectory, how religion, agriculture, and scientific revolutions shaped the world we live in today.

Update: This could soon be replaced by Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Update 2: this was replaced by Guns, Germs and Steel, its laughable how Sapiens looks amateurish in comparison.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

This is a breath of fresh air in times when all you see about new technologies is cynicism and depression. This is a book about humanity as it builds new technologies and what happens when we are faced with questions never faced before. It is a book about human ingenuity and a call to action to build a better world.

Guns, Germs and Steel

I've written extensivelly about it on my blog post, but as a gist it gives you a bird eye view on how societies become complex and what are the raw materials that allow that complexity to occur. It desmistifies lot's of assumptions with regards to colonialism, and shows how multiple waves of colonialism meant that today's winner might be next century's loser.

It's followed through with the author showing experiments you can take to compare possible explanations for societies to "win" over others.

I highly recommend anyone hoping to understand what the human history was from a "resource" heavy deep dive.

Science

Collapsing Universe

If I had to recommend only one book to give to a teenager who isn't interested in physics because of how school teaches it, it would be this one. This book makes physics human, it shows how we have tried to categorize and understand reality since the beginning of times and where our current understanding lies now. It provides experiments people can try today to see how the old physicists grew their knowledge of the world back then, and how they identified new ways of understanding.

Some other thoughts, since I've written this list many of the authors here have hit – lets say – a rough patch in social media, this does not change how I feel about the books they wrote, they are still pretty good, even if I don't like how they have acted online since then.